Aftershock
by Laura W
Summary: Written for Secret Drabble 2015. Shortly after Voyager's return, Tom tells his side of the story. Implied P/T.


Secret Drabble 2015

The request was for a story featuring Tom Paris, and the first line was supplied by Delwin, the story's recipient. Enjoy.

"Aftershock"

With all due respect…sir: You weren't there.

I just bet he did. In fact, I bet all my former shipmates said it, all but one, and I bet she was thinking it even if her misplaced respect for the uniform you're wearing made it impossible for her to say it. But the fact remains: You weren't there. So for you to judge her and…

No, I will not sit down.

Fine. Take my posting. Take my rank. Take my damn reinstatement, for all I care. If you're going to drum her out of the service over this, it's not worth anything to me anyway.

Of course I'm serious.

Yes, it's that important.

All right, here it is, as plain as I can tell it.

The planet was called Arteris. Third in orbit around a yellow dwarf. M Class, salty oceans, two medium-sized land masses, a small moon. Seven didn't know much except they were pre-warp and not worth assimilating, which meant they probably didn't have anything we wanted, either.

Yeah, that's how we evaluated people sometimes. Had they been visited by the Borg, had they been assimilated? We didn't have the luxury of a million teraquads of information at our fingertips, did we?

There was a high concentration of organic and inert particles in the lower atmosphere, which meant they were probably still burning fossil fuels, and the resulting pollution in the upper atmosphere would probably mask us from detection if we were careful.

The moon sure got our attention. We were in the middle of a bad run, and…

A bad run. That's what we called it when we were low on…on everything, to be honest. Dilithium reserves, raw materials, fresh food. It wasn't always like that, but sometimes it was.

Anyway, we were six weeks past a skirmish that had left us limping along at low warp. We didn't have enough food or water, and Harry – Ensign Kim, that is – suggested dialing back life support to conserve energy. Anybody who came from an oxygen-rich environment was starting to feel it, and it was cold, too. People were hungry, oxygen-starved, and cold.

So that's when we came across Arteris. There was nothing on the surface that we wanted and we couldn't have gone down anyway.

You know why.

You really want me to say it?

Fine. The Prime Directive. That's why we bypassed Arteris and went right for the moon. It was a lifeless rock that had a lot of minerals there for the taking. B'Elanna – Lieutenant Torres, my wife – figured we could beam away what we needed without mining the surface. So we wouldn't mar it, exactly. We couldn't leave any traces of our presence. Not if we wanted to abide by the Prime Directive.

The Captain didn't like it. The moon was pretty close in – about half the distance of our Moon's orbit – and even though these people were pre-warp, they weren't very pre-warp. Commander Chakotay characterized them as mid-21st Century, by Terran developmental standards. They knew theoretically how to create a warp bubble, but they were probably still a few decades away from it. They had telescopes and orbital satellites and they were aware of the distant stars and planets, but not yet aware that they weren't alone in the Universe.

So it was a tough call. The risk of them seeing us was low, but it was there, and the Captain didn't want to throw this civilization into a cultural tailspin before they were ready. B'Elanna and I came up with a plan to put more refined sensors on the Flyer and get right in close to the moon. The plan was to beam the minerals out of the deepest subterranean layers a tiny bit at a time. Practically molecule by molecule. We'd use the Flyer's transporter to pull what we needed and send it on to Voyager's cargo hold. A massive site-to-site. The Captain finally agreed, but only if we went in silent and dark.

Everything went to plan at first. We were even monitoring the planet's comm systems to see if anybody was talking about us, but apparently they couldn't see us at all. Then about an hour in, we detected a massive disturbance on the planet. Earthquake on the smaller of the two land masses, a powerful one. At least a 9 on the Richter Scale, and concentrated in the continent's most populated region.

Even without sensors, you could see it with the naked eye. It was that devastating. We turned all our sensors planetside and saw part of a mountain range just…crumble. Right before our eyes. The quake went on for almost two minutes.

There was a second of weird silence…and then our comms panel lit up. Traffic from the surface. The Universal Translator couldn't keep up with it all. Emergency comms, news reports, people trying to contact their loved ones. It was a wall of noise and color. We sat there and watched for probably an hour, watching these people panicking, trying to pull away the rubble and find each other. Pulling bodies from the wreckage. Sometimes not even bodies. Sometimes just…pieces.

I saw a mother screaming, running through a street with half a…

Shit.

I just…

Sorry. Okay.

B'Elanna and I…we couldn't speak. We didn't have to.

When we thought we couldn't take it anymore, the Flyer's sensors went wild.

Aftershock. An aftershock was coming, almost as bad as the initial quake.

That's when we remembered the sensors and transporters were already tuned to detect and move microminerals.

B'Elanna didn't even hesitate. She retargeted the systems before I could stop her.

But I wasn't going to stop her.

Not after what I'd seen.

I was thinking I should comm the ship. Not to ask permission, just to tell her what we were planning.

But I didn't have to.

Her comm came through on a masked frequency, text only. Two words.

"Do it."

So we did.

Then we finished the mining operation, and we got the hell out of there.

So with all due respect, sir, you weren't there. You didn't see what we saw that day, or any of the days out there. You don't know what it was like. We were targets too often, too often the enemy. We were aware every day that we were alone out there, and usually five minutes away from the next disaster. It wore on all of us, and it wore on her.

But once in a while, we were able to do something to help someone else feel that they weren't alone, even if they'd never know about it.

I guess that's what kept us going sometimes. That knowledge that as bad as things were, there was still good we could do in the Delta Quadrant. Maybe it's what kept her going.

And if you intend to drum her out of the service for that…

I'm pretty sure that's not a service she'd want to be a part of anyway.

It sure as hell isn't a service I want to be a part of.

With all due respect.

Sir.

-END-


End file.
